 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Use the official NCAA or NAIA records as much as possible, with asterisks and links to explain further. |
The NCAA and the NAIA are empowered to impose a variety of sanctions upon schools that violate their organization's rules on athletic eligibility. One such tool is the vacation of wins gained by a school during a period of ineligibility. This essay is written toward the NCAA's application of the concept of vacated wins, but can also operationally apply to NAIA vacated wins.
The NCAA prescribes different treatment for vacated wins or contests depending on whether the affected match was a regular season game or took place during a tournament or bowl. In most cases, the win is stricken from the penalized team's official record, but the opponent retains the associated loss. This asymmetric treatment results in certain anomalies in affected teams' records. The essay undertakes to describe the NCAA's policies on the treatment of vacated wins and to set forth a consistent and appropriate approach in Wikipedia articles containing statistics that are affected by the vacation of wins by the NCAA.[nb 1]
In addition, the NCAA maintains only a limited number of "official" records and thus its formal policy on vacated wins offers little or no guidance on how such vacated wins should be reflected in a variety of other common but "unofficial" statistics that derive from teams' official wins and losses, such as series records between individual teams. The essay thus also surveys sources addressing those issues to arrive at a consistent treatment of these derivative and "unofficial" statistics, which treatment should also be reflected in Wikipedia articles.
In general, the official NCAA record should be shown in the penalized team's season article, with asterisks used to briefly explain the record and to permit the reader to determine the team's original, historical record. The article about the school's athletic program should include a section on the vacated wins, which should be linked to whenever possible in lieu of extensive explanation at the bottom of every section. The season and lifetime records of the coach of the penalized team should be similarly modified and annotated. By and large the record of the opposing team in regular season play will be unaffected; however, the NCAA does not track, and has no policy, on the treatment of various derivative statistics such as series records. Where series records are displayed, they should exclude the game altogether, rather than be listed from the points of view of each of the two teams.
Articles describing affected matches written before the imposition of sanctions (assuming that they are otherwise consistent with Wikipedia policy) should remain largely unchanged. This NCAA revises results, not history, and this essay only undertakes to describe how such games should be reflected in the numerical tally of the win-loss and other records of the affected teams and coaches.
Cite error: There are <ref group=nb> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=nb}} template (see the help page).